The Korean War Read Online Free PDF

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    The last years of Korea’s notional independence took on a Gilbertian absurdity. The nation’s leaders, artless in the business of diplomacy and modern power politics, squirmed and floundered in the net that was inexorably closing around them. The Chinese recognised their military inability to confront the Japanese in Korea. Tokyo’s grasp on Korea’s internal government tightened until, in 1896, the King tried to escape thraldom by taking refuge at the Russian Legation in Seoul. From this sanctuary, he issued orders for the execution of all his pro-Japanese ministers. The Japanese temporarily backed down.
    In the next seven years, Moscow and Tokyo competed for power and concessions in Seoul. The devastating Japanese victory at Tsushima, a few miles off Pusan, decided the outcome. In February 1904, the Japanese moved a large army into Korea. In November the following year, the nation became a Japanese protectorate. In a characteristic exercise of the colonial cynicism of the period, the British accepted Japanese support for their rule in India in exchange for blessing Tokyo’s takeover of Korea. Whitehall acknowledged Japan’s right ‘to take such measures of guidance,control, and protection in Corea [ sic ] as she may deem proper and necessary’, to promote her ‘paramount political, military and economic interests’.
    Korean independence thus became a dead letter. In the years that followed, a steady stream of Japanese officials and immigrants moved into the country. Japanese education, roads, railways, sanitation were introduced. Yet none of these gained the slightest gratitude from the fiercely nationalistic Koreans. Armed resistance grew steadily in the hands of a strange alliance of Confucian scholars, traditional bandits, Christians, and peasants with local grievances against the colonial power. The anti-Japanese guerrilla army rose to a peak of an estimated 70,000 men in 1908. Thereafter, ruthless Japanese repression broke it down. Korea became an armed camp, in which mass executions and wholesale imprisonment were commonplace, and all dissent forbidden. On 22 August 1910, the Korean emperor signed away all his rights of sovereignty. The Japanese introduced their own titles of nobility, and imposed their own military government. For the next thirty-five years, despite persistent armed resistance from mountain bands of nationalists, many of them communist, the Japanese maintained their ruthless, detested rule in Korea, which also became an important base for their expansion north into Manchuria in the nineteen thirties.
    Yet despite the decline of China into a society of competing warlords, and the preoccupation of Russia with her own revolution, even before the Second World War it was apparent that Korea’s geographical position, as the nearest meeting place of three great nations, would make her a permanent focus of tension and competition. The American Tyler Dennett wrote presciently in 1945, months before the Far Eastern war ended:
Many of the international factors which led to the fall of Korea are either unchanged from what they were half a century ago, or are likely to recur the moment peace is restored to the East. Japan’s hunger for power will have been extinguished for a period, but not for ever. In another generation probably Japan will again be a very important influence in the Pacific. Meanwhile the Russian interest in the peninsula is likely to remain what it was forty years ago. Quite possibly that factor will be more important than ever before. The Chinese also may be expected to continue their traditional concern in the affairs of that area. 2
     
    And now, suddenly, the war was over, and the Japanese empire was in the hands of the broker’s men. Koreans found themselves freed from Japanese domination, looking for fulfilment of the promise of the leaders of the Grand Alliance in the 1943 Cairo Declaration – that Korea should become free and independent ‘in due course’.
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